At the Yunqi Conference in Hangzhou in October 217, Alibaba announced the formal establishment of the Dharma Institute, saying that it would invest 1 billion yuan in basic science and subversive technological innovation research in the next three years. Dharma Institute focuses on five major fields: machine intelligence, data calculation, robotics, financial technology and X laboratory, with 14 laboratories accordingly, and nearly 7 experts at home and abroad are in charge. Although it still can't catch up with Intel, Dharma Institute has achieved excellent level in several fields.

Dharma Institute has made great achievements in the three technical fields of speech intelligence, language technology (natural language processing) and machine vision and platform construction. Achievements in speech intelligence

In June p>218, Ali Dharma Institute opened a new generation of speech recognition model (DFSMN) independently developed, and conducted a public test on LibriSpeech

, the world's largest free speech recognition database. Compared with the most widely used LSTM model in the industry at present, the DFSMN speech recognition model has faster training speed and higher recognition accuracy. Based on the DFSMN model, Ali AI developed the

DFSMN-CTC model, which greatly reduced the speech error rate and improved the decoding efficiency by 6 times. Achievements in language technology

The machine translation technical team of Dharma Institute has achieved 48

language translation directions, supporting Russian, Spanish, French, Arab, Turkish, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese and other languages; Among them, e-commerce covers most language directions and scenes, surpassing Google and Amazon, with a daily call volume of 1.79 < P > billion times. Ali's machine translation technology is not only used in e-commerce full link service, but also widely used in rookie logistics clearance, Alibaba Cloud international community, flying pig travel translation assistant, nail social oral translation and a series of products. Achievements in machine vision

In July 219, in the LPIRC (Low Power Image Recognition Challenge) held by CVPR 219, Ali AI won the first place in the online image classification task, and classified 2, images in 1 minutes with a single image classification speed of 23ms

. On the training data set used in the challenge, the classification accuracy is 67.4%

, which is 3.5% higher than the official baseline.

Ali AI

puts forward a "recursive exploration dialogue model", which integrates three abilities: image recognition, relational reasoning and natural language understanding. By efficiently using labeled information, it can learn the thinking mode of imitating human cognitive complex scenes, effectively identify the entities in the pictures and their relationships, infer the event content described in the pictures, and effectively model the context to understand the questions and real intentions raised by human beings and give natural and accurate responses. How powerful is the Dharma Institute

Ma Yun said that Alibaba may not have it, but the Dharma Institute can stay. Judging from what Ma Yun said, it is conceivable how powerful the Dharma Institute is.

The research direction of Dharma Institute is the future market development direction and high-tech technology. It may not see much achievement in the short term, but once the research is successful, it will bring great changes.